My iPhone Review

Well, I bought an Apple iPhone on Tuesday morning and have been playing with it since so that I can bring you my initial thoughts.

First of all, I love it! I won't spend too much 'ink' here talking about how cool it is. If you want to get a flavor for the things that it can do, I highly recommend the 25 minute video on Apple's iPhone website. I will spend some time here on improvements that should be made to it. I am a happy customer and I really do love the thing. For perspective, I only had the most basic of cellphones prior to this.

Buying it was simple. I checked the inventory at my local store the night before online, saw that they had it and went there at 9:00. There was a modest line - perhaps about 20 to 25 people. It took me 20 minutes to get served. I had my Sony eReader so I was happily reading Salon.com iPhone commentary while I waited.

Activation was super easy. It literally took me 2 minutes from plugging the thing into my computer. I already had AT&T so that it made it really seamless.

So on with the critique. I will label these either software issues or hardware issues. Software issues can actually be solved seamlessly by Apple if they desire without need for a new phone. Hardware, of course, would.

• Provide seamless integration with all of yahoo's domain names for email. I pay for AT&T/Yahoo broadband but have a sbcglobal.net email address instead of a .yahoo.com address. Unfortunately Apple has hardcoded the .yahoo in the setup for yahoo mail. Doh! At first I just set my mail account up as a POP account (simple). But then I decided that I wanted to take advantage of the IMAP service that yahoo provides so I found out that my sbcglobal.net account comes with a free alias that IS a yahoo domain name. So now I use the .yahoo domain name as my main iPhone email account. It's the exact same mailbox (good) but when I send email from my iPhone, the sender sees my email addy as the .yahoo address. That could be confusing. This leads to my second critique.... (software fix)
  
• Provide a "reply to" option for email. (software fix)
  
• Allow email to be landscaped. Now I'm spoiled when using the browser (Safari) because I can turn the phone on it's side to view pages in landscape. This is great for some sites because of column width issues. But it makes viewing an HTML email seem less functional because I often times find myself turning the phone on it's side - but to no avail. (software fix)
  
• Provide a font size button. Not normally an issue due to the way you can double click on a column in a website to set the screen width to that column width. However for some pages that have no HTML columns, this can be hard to read in either landscape or portrait mode. Simple fix - provide a font size button - maybe just S,M, L. (software fix)
  
• Improve the AT&T Edge network. The speed is about twice that of a dial-up. This has been written about extensively. Well - it's not THAT bad but then, I'm used to nothing, so I still like it when not in a WiFi hotspot. Surprisingly, Google maps works pretty darn fast using the Edge network. Not sure why... (hardware fix to be compatible with 3G networks)
  
• Provide the ability to edit contact information or take notes while listening to a voice mail. This integration is not there so it's frustrating when someone leaves a phone number of message on a voice mail (not the originating phone number!) and you can't just input it into your contacts or take notes right away. (software fix)
  
• Provide a 'delete all' button for the camera roll. You have to go through one at a time to delete them. Since the download application uploads all your camera roll pictures into the computer at one time, it only makes sense that 95% of the time you would want to go back and delete all of them from the iPhone at one time. (software fix)
  
• Provide a sync to Yahoo! calendars. For Windows, it only syncs with Outlook. This is OK and works great but I don't like applications anymore that only exist on one machine. I work and I am at home - usually two (or more) machines. I want the same access from all places. The iPhone integrates lovely with Yahoo! Contacts so this would not be a stretch. The world is going ASP! (software fix)
  
• Start a manual email download when entering the email account, not the individual mail folder. Since I have two email accounts set up right now (and may add more), I don't really think it's necessary to have the extra touches. (software fix)
  
• Provide the ability for the Safari browser to add the currently viewed URL to your contact list web page field. Another integration point that would be very east to implement and pretty useful. (software fix)

That's all I have so far. If it sounds like I don't like it, it's not that at ALL. In fact, because the integration between applications and the usability is SO incredible - it actually makes the small areas of improvement that much easier and obvious to find!

Oh - the phone works great here in Dallas as well! hahaha